The Living Atlas has a group of feature layers that contain over 100 detailed tables from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, making over 1,100 attributes on demographics, socioeconomics, and housing available across the ArcGIS platform. We've also provided some commonly calculated percentages from the American Community estimates to support your workflows. If you want to combine some counts and construct some additional attributes, it's easy to do so using Arcade Expressions. Here's a simple example:
Say you're a social services analyst for a county, and you want to find out the count and percentage of children who live in single-parent families. You found the ACS Living Arrangements Variables layer in the Living Atlas, and you see two attributes:
- Total Population Under 18 Years in Male Householder (no wife present) Family Households (B09008_010E)
- Total Population Under 18 Years in Female Householder (no husband present) Family Households (B09008_011E)
You could create a quick Arcade Expression to add these two to get the count of children in single-parent families:
$feature["B09008_010E"]+$feature["B09008_011E"]
Now to get the percentage, you can take advantage of the pre-calculated percentages! In this case, the two you would be interested in are:
- Percent of Children in Single-Male Householder Families (B09008_calc_pctSME)
- Percent of Children in Single-Female Householder Families (B09008_calc_pctSFE)
The Arcade Expression for the percent of children in single-parent families looks like this:
$feature["B09008_calc_pctSME"]+$feature["B09008_calc_pctSFE"]
Alternatively, you could find the field that contains the denominator you need and divide, making your Arcade Expression as follows:
($feature["B09008_010E"]+$feature["B09008_011E"])/$feature["B09008_001E"]*100
Add your custom calculations here!
Have you constructed any custom statistics with the americancommunitysurvey layers available in the Living Atlas? Please share them below! If you have questions as you're calculating custom statistics, feel free to ask (and answer!) them here.
